Trump’s FDA Chief Is a Close Friend of Pot’s Sworn Enemy

When President Donald Trump’s selected Scott Gottlieb—a physician and fellow at a conservative think-tank—to head the Food and Drug Administration, marijuana’s last hope for some help in Trump’s cabinet died out.

Since Congress is taking the lead on becoming America’s death squad, killing health insurance for 24 million Americans, Gottlieb will be best-positioned to address Trump’s purported goal of bringing down the price of prescription drugs. (But not by letting generic drugs in from Canada; that would be… bad, somehow.)

This choice may also impact cannabis reform in America, and not in a good way. With Gottlieb’s elevation, there’s now a trifecta of serious stumbling blocks to marijuana reform calling key shots in the White House.

Gottlieb does not appear to be nearly as ideological (in all the wrong ways) as Tom Price, the current head of the Department of Health and Human Services who was a staunch anti-medical-marijuana vote while in Congress. And he’s no Jeff Sessions (for there to be multiple living, breathing Civil War re-enactors in Washington’s echelons of power would be a neat trick).

Parsing his own words, Gottlieb appears almost agnostic on cannabis. Aside from tweeting out links to a few studies, he has said next to nothing on the subject. He doesn’t have to. With Gottlieb, there’s one significant problem: He’s a very, very good friend of one of marijuana’s sworn enemies.

After leaving the George W. Bush-era FDA, where he served as a top deputy, Gottlieb jumped straight into the arms of the pharmaceutical industry.

As Leafly News reported, he’s been a consultant for several very big pharma firms and raked in $400,000 from pharmaceutical companies in recent years. His ties to drug companies are strong—and drug companies, you may recall, really don’t like marijuana. At all.

Nearly all significant progress toward undoing the War on Drugs and pushing for more knowledge about cannabis and what it does to our brains and bodies has been at the state level. That’s good, but it can only go so far.

Across the country, scientists and now elected officials are lamenting how little we actually know about marijuana. The federal government wields significant power over scientific research—feds decide where grants go, and the feds also have control over the lone supply of marijuana available for study.

To push forward, cannabis is in need of an ally—someone who will make it easier for researchers—if Trump’s people were serious about deregulating everything, including restrictions on who can study Schedule I drugs like marijuana and how, maybe, it would be a good thing.

But with Price and Sessions calling shots over Gottlieb’s head, this seems unlikely. Trump’s cabinet remains an anti-marijuana minefield.